# Decide which skills to build and which to drop this year

A prioritized 12-month skills plan: what to master, what to learn before it loses value, and what to stop investing in.

- Topic: Career & Job Search
- Framework: Few-Shot
- Level: Advanced
- Tags: Fill-in Template
- Source: https://www.thinkwithprompt.com/prompts/decide-which-skills-to-build-and-which-to-drop-this-year

## Prompt

```text
Help me decide where to put my learning time over the next 12 months as AI changes my field.

**My role, level, and industry:** [DETAILS]
**Where I want to be in 2-3 years:** [GOAL - e.g. "lead an analytics team", "stay hands-on but more senior"]
**My current strengths:** [SKILLS]
**Skills I spend most of my time using today:** [SKILLS]
**Time I can realistically give to learning:** [HOURS PER WEEK]

Sort my skills and candidate skills into four groups:
1. **Double down** - work I should become exceptionally good at because it compounds and is hard to replicate.
2. **Learn now** - skills that are valuable today but likely to lose value, where learning them soon still pays off (or the window is closing).
3. **Build new** - skills my role will increasingly need (e.g. directing AI tools, data judgment, specific domain depth).
4. **Let go** - skills becoming less valuable that I should stop polishing, with what replaces them.

For each skill give: why it belongs in that group, how confident you are (high / medium / low), and the signal that would change your mind.

Return:
1. The four groups as a table: Skill | Group | Reason | Confidence | Signal to watch.
2. My top 3 priorities for the year, sequenced by quarter, with one real-work project that would practice each.
3. How I will know each skill is good enough (an observable result, not hours studied).

Do not invent labor-market statistics. If you reference trends, describe them as general direction and tell me to check current sources for my field and location.
```

## What to fill in

- DETAILS
- SKILLS
- HOURS PER WEEK

Free to copy and use. From ThinkWithPrompt (https://www.thinkwithprompt.com/), a library of 2,663 curated AI prompts.